DDP Current Topics

The following issues are under immediate or pressing need for consideration, discussion, or helpful volunteers.

DDP and www.debian.org integration
Jay Treacy has opened a topic on standardizing file locations for packages, for the web site, and probably within the DDP. See Todo for more information.
LDP cooperation
We need to be more integrated with the LDP project, since we can't do it alone. Some have stepped forward to package some of the LDP documents.
Making debiandoc-sgml safe for Internationalization
It's not entirely clear yet what has to be done for debiandoc-sgml to be multi-lingual friendly. Some have started working on a basic grove-based SGML structure extractor, which helps keep structural similarity between different translations of one document. We know that file output naming might need to be changed or post-processed for documents in content-negotiated web spaces. Other problems need to be identified.

Issues on packaging documentation.

The question is how document correlate into packages. Having one package per document has the following advantages:

Packages will be small. If a single document is updated, one does not have to download all documents.
Things are clearer if the package maintainer is the document maintainer (i.e., author).
One can easily report bugs against documents.

but also the following disadvantages:

We already have enough packages and some users already complain that there are too many.

Here is a proposal (which is probably a little obsolete). Current thinking is that manuals should reside in their own packages, unless the manuals are very small. The accountability given by the BTS and the ability to ship new versions without fuss seem to outweigh the minor point of reducing packages.

I suggest the following Debian packages:

Debian Package	Documents
debian-doc	META Manual, Hardware Compatibility List, Installation Manual, Release Notes, FAQ, Debian Tips, User's Manual, Debian System Administrators Manual
debian-policy	Policy Manual
debian-doc-dev	Project Manual, Developers Reference Manual, Programmer's Manual, Making a Debian Package, Packaging HOWTO, Documentation Guidelines, How to get started with SGML
dpkg-dev	dpkg Reference Manual, dpkg Internals

Note that I suggest renaming doc-debian into debian-doc since I find the latter name much better.

(by Adam Di Carlo (?))

Do we need any sort of policy statement about this issue?